1. Field of the Invention
The invention is related to a cell incubating apparatus and the method of culturing cells in vitro, and especially, relates to a medical cell proliferation, pharmaceutical chemical screening and automatic cell analysis in tissue engineering technology.
2. Description of Related Art
In the field of tissue engineering, cell transplantation will play an important role in the future. Currently, the cell propagation apparatuses, which comprise not only for traditional laboratory cell incubating techniques but also for traditional bioreactors, have limitations for incubating a medical cell source. The shortcoming of the traditional laboratory cell incubating techniques mentioned above is the lack of a mass transporting system and difficult to display the real physiological activities ongoing inside the cell body. The bioreactor is only suitable in protein drug production as in, for example, the production volume of the stromal cells and fibroblasts with better tolerance for the above shortcoming. The bioreactor is excessively large and difficult to operate, has large fluidic shear force, lacks micro-environments similar to the physiological environment, and is impossible to incubate some tissue specific cells so far, for example, hepatocytes. Besides, using these bioreactors to produce personal cells is expensive; therefore, it is difficult industrializing cell production for personal cell therapy.
Massachusettes Institute of Technology and Massachusetts General Hospital in the United States disclosed a system containing micromatrix, an injection unit and sensors in WO9947922. The system is mainly used in pharmaceutical screening and analysis. However, even through the system illustrated above can maintain the cell function in vitro, the cells in the system forms a cell mass which is hard to isolate and expand. In the patent pended by University of California at San Diego, U.S. Pat. No. 20020072116, disclosed a nanoporous silicon bioreactor which is used for pharmaceutical screening such as analysis for the biological activity, metabolism, toxicity, mutagenicity or carcinogenicity of compounds. However, such a bioreactor is only for maintaining the function in vitro and not fit for cell proliferation.
Therefore, it is desirable to provide an improved method to mitigate the aforementioned problems.